Assistant Lecturer, Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California

Does Obamacare Infringe on Our Liberty? Or Does It Give Us Even More Freedom?

02/07/2014 04:54 pm ETUpdated
Apr 09, 2014

What right does the government have to make you buy health insurance?

That's the question that riles Obamacare critics the most. It's not the premiums or the website or the dropped coverage. It's the infringement on their liberty.

You hear it all the time: "This is a free country!" That's what everybody says. But what do they really mean? Do they know what freedom is?

It seems obvious at first. Freedom is lack of coercion. Therefore, anything the government makes you do infringes on your freedom.

But there are different types of coercion, and the government isn't the only one doing the coercing.

Let's say that you want your daughter to attend the best school in America. But you can't afford the tuition. Do you really have freedom of choice? If you choose the school you want, they won't let you through the front door. If you force your way in, they'll arrest you.

So you "choose" a more affordable school. You wanted a better school, but they forced you to settle for a different one. Sounds like coercion to me.

Let's consider another example. You want to retire at the age of 65. You've worked hard throughout your entire adult life. Unfortunately, wages haven't risen, and the bills kept piling up. You saved as much as you could, but it's only enough to live off for a couple years. Oh, and one more thing: Social Security and Medicare don't exist.

If you "choose" to retire, you'll go broke. You'll go without preventive health care. Your chances of dying early will increase significantly.

So you have a choice: Keep working or die young.

In this case, you actually have less freedom because the government is less involved. Without Social Security and Medicare, you do not have the freedom to choose a long, healthy retirement.

Freedom requires more than the absence of laws and taxes. True freedom of choice requires the capability to make that choice -- and the free market doesn't always give us that capability.

Jobs are scarce. Most of us don't have the freedom to work anywhere we want. We take what we can get. For many of us, that means working at a company that doesn't pay for our health insurance so we "choose" to buy insurance on the individual market.

Before Obamacare, the individual market charged really low rates to healthy people and really high rates to sick people. So the people who needed insurance the most couldn't afford it. They didn't have the capability -- and therefore the freedom -- to buy it.

Obamacare outlaws that kind of discrimination. It requires insurers to charge the same rates to healthy and sick people alike, and that means that healthy people will have to pay higher rates. Some of them won't want to, so they'll stop buying insurance. When they drop out, they leave behind the sicker people who are most costly to insure, forcing insurers to raise rates even more. It's a vicious cycle, a "death spiral," that results in almost everyone being priced out of the market.

Virtually no one will have the freedom to buy health insurance on the individual market.

And that's why we have an individual mandate. If the healthy people don't drop out, there's no death spiral, and the insurance remains affordable for the people who need it the most.

The government gives them a freedom that the free market cannot. It gives them the capability to purchase health insurance.

If we choose not to buy insurance, we pay a penalty. As Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has written, "It makes going without insurance just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income." Those taxes pay for our roads and Army and Navy and Social Security and Medicare -- and those things give us the freedom to live a life that we often take for granted. Without those taxes, without those government-funded investments, we could not call ourselves a free country.

In the same way, without Obamacare, without the government making us buy health insurance, we would be condemning millions of Americans to lives without health care. We would be restricting their freedom. And what right do we have to do that?